The spring of 2021 marks an inflection point in America’s historic seesaw battle over the future of democracy and freedom. Over 360 pieces of legislation have been introduced to limit, suppress, and overthrow the right to vote in a campaign comparable to the imposition of Jim Crow fascism in the South from 1890 to 1910. What happens now in the statehouses, in the Capitol, and in the streets will determine the fate of the millions who are turning to the political arena to carry out the struggle for the racial and economic justice they need to survive.
The most notorious of the bills passed so far was the one in Georgia: restricting absentee voting, prohibiting people from handing out food and water to voters in line, and empowering partisan state officials to remove non-partisan local election boards. But altogether, some 43 states have introduced voter suppression laws, including 14 that would allow politicians to seize or limit the authority of election officials. These bills would effectively give Republicans the power to overturn election results, just as Donald Trump demanded during his unsuccessful election challenges in 2020.
National Outrage
This attack has sparked a wave of resistance to voter suppression. It is a continuation of the bitter battles of the 2020 elections: the heated primary campaigns, the George Floyd rebellion, the massive voter registration and turnout movements, the election protectors, and the united movement to remove Donald Trump from office. The resistance to voter suppression is inseparable from the rising rebellion protesting the upsurge in new police murders during the Derek Chauvin trial. The issues are the same: survival of humanity and the planet in the era of state violence, pandemics, and ecological apocalypse. Through it all, now and in the near future, voting will continue to be an indispensable weapon.
The national outrage after the passage of Georgia’s voter suppression law (SB 202) has swept the country and energized the movement. “These are not men and women who are unclear about their motives and their effect,” said Stacy Abrams of the people promoting the laws in Georgia and elsewhere. “These bills are being promulgated across the country with the intended effect of blocking voters who are becoming inconvenient to the Republican Party: voters of color, young people, and the poor.” Threats to boycott corporations forced hundreds of corporate executives to speak out against voter suppression.
All these battles were and are grounded in the new class of workers, who depend for survival on the fight to force government to address their needs, and are the backbone of the resistance. These are the workers who have lost their jobs and been replaced by digital production and artificial intelligence, a process that has been dramatically speeded up by COVID-19. With no access to income or resources, they are forced to fight politically for programs to enable them to obtain housing, health care, and education. However, like the 2020 Floyd rebellion, this movement has spread far beyond the dispossessed and to every sector of society. It involves millions of all colors and from all walks of life.
Next Steps
HR 1 (the For the People Act) has been passed by the House of Representatives and offers an immediate opportunity to decisively squash voter suppression and expand the franchise across the country. However, there is only a brief window to make this happen before state legislatures pass Republican gerrymander plans designed to disenfranchise millions. At this moment, it appears that HR 1 will be defeated in the Senate by the filibuster, an archaic rule that has served to help block majority rule and real democracy in America since the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Even though it only requires a majority vote to abolish or bypass the filibuster, and Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, so far, not enough of them have been willing to defend the right to vote and make it happen.
In spite of some attempts to distance itself, the whole voter suppression campaign remains hopelessly entangled with the overt fascism of Donald Trump and the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6. After all, the objective is the same: a corporate dictatorship. While pretending to deplore the “loss of life and violence at our nation’s Capitol,” former Vice President Mike Pence supported the same kind of “state-based” reform advocated by Trump, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers. “State-based” reform is limiting vote by mail, restricting registration, ending requirements to count every vote, and banning voting by the formerly incarcerated.
Voter suppression is violence. This was emphasized by Gov. Kemp’s signing of SB 202 in front of a painting of a slave plantation, while African American legislator Park Cannon was hauled away in handcuffs for simply knocking on his door. Voting rights leaders are utilizing every tactic available to claw back and salvage the right to vote. The ACLU and the League of Women Voters, among others, are filing lawsuits.
If the Democrats fail to honor their promises and fail to pass HR 1 and its companion legislation, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA), the struggle will not be over but will take place under much more difficult conditions. The same states supporting voter suppression are also moving to restore Jim Crow era restrictions on the right to march and the right to protest. The battles in the streets will inevitably continue, however, as will the electoral campaigns. The 2022 elections, like the projected re-election campaign of newly elected Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, will be another test of the strength and determination of all those grassroots Georgia organizations that sprang up and expanded overnight in 2020.
Economic Democracy
COVID-19 has taught us how disastrous it can be when government does not do its job to protect each and every person. The job of government, the values it supports, and how it executes its job is called governance. The nature of governance is revealed in the laws and budgets that a government body passes. The purpose of good governance is to meet the needs of the people.
Voter suppression, corporate bail-outs, massive police budgets, and anti-human, anti-nature legislation are characteristic of governance by a corporate dictatorship. The vast extension of corporate governance reveals a ruling class that is defending its interests against the interests of the people.
The fight for democracy is expressed first in the battle for the ballot, but actually extends to every aspect of life, at a time when human survival depends on using government as an instrument to meet basic needs. The right to vote is not just about political democracy, but economic democracy as well — using government to enact and implement an economic bill of rights. Corporations are forced to move toward fascist dictatorship because economic rights for people reduce their profits.
This battle is breaking out in the local governments across the country that provide many of the vital programs we recognize as public services, including transportation, public safety, public health, housing, schools, and human needs. Local governments fund the vast majority of infrastructure projects as well, with varying levels of state and federal support: roads, buildings, bridges, and transportation projects. And significantly, local governments are where many new class political leaders are running for office and beginning to win positions.
However, since 2008, local governments all across the country have been bankrupted and broken by predatory Wall Street banks and austerity programs, based on the lie that America has no money. At the same time, local police budgets are often over 40 percent of the total city or county budgets. Funding the police acts as a veto over funding for basic needs. Good governance means defunding the police and investing in life-sustaining policies and institutions that make us safe. True democratic governance is not enforcing scarcity for the benefit of corporations. It is managing abundance through economic democracy and reconstruction.
While revolutionaries never stop explaining that the ultimate aim is a cooperative society, they ground all their teaching in the immediate battles of the people. Now is not the time for ideological differences. Ideological preconditions can only block and derail the revolutionary process that is shaking up America. Unity of action in the fight for people’s basic needs is the foundation for the revolutionary movement of the future. Digital technology has made the ideological wars of the past centuries obsolete, no matter how hard the ruling class tries to revive and sustain them.
People of every creed and conviction have been displaced and expelled from the private property economy. Now is the time to bring them together, from all nationalities, religious and cultural backgrounds, political tendencies, and social identities, in practical struggles for practical demands. Revolution means embracing this movement, this powerful social force that is arising and participating in working out its aims and strategies in the fight for the future of life on earth. Winning the battle for the right to vote is a key part of this process. RC
July/August 2021. vol.31. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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